Brother's Keeper
by tami3
Summary: Rhode has always been the eldest of the Noah. And she, unlike Cain, is willing to be her brother's keeper. Rhode and Tyki family story.


-1Brother's Keeper

And the Lord said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? And he said, I know not: Am I my brother's keeper?  
And he said, What hast thou done? the voice of thy brother's blood crieth unto me from the ground.  
-- Genesis 4: 9-10

Rhode had been alive and alone for centuries before anything changed. Her earliest years were spent wandering the suffuse thickets of a newer Earth, of hot and wet forests and oceans seething with what would later swarm the land.

She had loped through dry lands and sodden jungles, collecting flowers for pleasure and drinking the milk of gentle beasts before she hungered for their flesh. Later, some tedious men, both young and old, would call themselves "Bookmen" and liken her to Eve. She would laugh at the idea.

Rhode had only one other, what or who was called a man before apes clambered down from the branches to usurp that title. But for now, Rhode shared her life with this man, who called himself the Duke of the Millennium.

He bade her to keep patience as they occupied each other's company in full. The man was not her father, nor her husband, or her child. He had, however, come before her, and that and other instincts told her to obey him for the most part. She was never troubled enough by it to question why.

She listened to him promise her a great many things one day, like many blessed lambs to sacrifice, a flock of playmates, and everything else in the world as her toy. It was also from his knowledge that she knew the quiet age would soon end. Their time and place was beautiful, but passive--the vivid forests kept to themselves, and the stolid mountains kept to themselves, and the rapid rivers kept to themselves. Only they moved.

But it was for certain that their family was coming. Rhode kept her gray elbows on her gray knees as she thought about more people like her, who would feel water flow into the hatched grooves on their brows when they stooped to drink.

Her master told her that when they did come she, as his eldest, must tend to them. Implanted in her body were things that would help the little ones survive. Soon, ugly things would come to trouble them. They would all have to do their parts, but she had come first for a reason; she was their barren mother, he chuckled as she kicked up her feet. Her power lay in her will to have them live.

She laid back in the grass and blew on the fluff of a burst weed. She counted the aloft seeds, the bloom's children, to be many. She let the wind pull them away. She hoped that her brethren would be as many, and too, scatter to grip the land with roots that would strangle the undeserving from the Earth.

--

Tyki arrives.

Tyki is a wild thing. It is easy to tell from his akimbo curls and the wicked mole under his eye. And he startles when the girl fawns on him. He throws up his arms to catch her but she moons on his soft neck and they are a mother and child in reverse.

He ends up tripping on his heel and collapsing against the looking glass he had been studying. The shock shakes loose a few drops of blood from the collection of spontaneous wounds spanning his forehead. It drizzles a modest red shower onto her head, to which she happily extends her tongue. She catches at the juicy stigmata.

"Oh, oh." she exclaims to the grinning fat man behind her. The liquid outlines her lips, dark as lacquer. "Earl, this one's cute!" She pushes herself up from his shoulders and feels his strong hands at the smalls of her back. She plants her mouth on his markings and she takes in the taste of him. He is deep and sweet with a stinging hint of warning poison; it is like wine biting at the insides of her cheeks.

The man catches himself in his surprise to glance upwards at the little thing refreshing herself on the mysterious cuts that have plagued him for the past few days. Slowly, a smile creeps into his expression as he carefully pries her loose and settles her in his arms.

He takes in her shorn hair that makes her look like a fuzzy nestling in his embrace, and she takes in the finely crafted bones of his face. He is a prettier thing than Lulubell, who dully inhabits her beautiful body like an unmoving painting within a frame.

It pleases Rhode to reach up and plant another kiss on his cheek. His warmth flickers in and out on her lips, sometimes there and sometimes not. She draws back blinking, realizing, and then crows in triumph as his Noah powers cinch the deal. He is coming with them, this pretty, wild foundling.

The man echoes her ecstasy by tapping her on her nose.

"You, little miss, are quite adorable. What might I call you?" he asks, playful and courteous.

--

When Allen snatched Tyki's Noah away she drifted, forlorn and aggrieved, to his discarded body on the floor. The girl she liked so much before was a homely thing now. She dripped all over. She was filthy from her leaking eyes bloating her messy face, to wrapped knees oozing through dust rags, to mouth pouring howls of the same two names. She was a heap of spouts.

Her head looked like the body of a poorly plucked chicken. When she was silent in her chair she had been graceful, but now she looked ridiculous. She crouched in a glass cube made puddles that wet the thick-looking man squatting next to her.

Boring, Rhode thought contemptuously. She hated her now, the wretch. Fighting a battle was no excuse for ugliness. Look! There was her Tyki, beaten but as beautiful as ever. She traced his delicate face before tucking him into her small arms and searching for the brush of breath on her skin. Vapor condensed weakly on her wrists. She buried her head in his chest, relief drawing at the edges of her sorrow and fury.

She hated this family at odds with her own.

They had been fun once, all of them. But now one was yammering her displeasure and hammering at her cage, another was a dull stranger beneath notice. Even Allen, who had had been so charming, was stupidly staring at her hug her dear brother like he didn't know how to feel.

But there was the one who ran her through with unfaltering loathing. The most despicable one was a red-haired boy groveling blank-eyed in solitary confinement. Somewhere further than his parted mouth and slack features, he was dancing frantically on the hot coals of trauma. The illusions were hardly deceptive at all; he was a real multiple-personality disorder mess.

He was fumbling on what to do with his adopted family. Here he clung to his perilous love for those that had penetrated deep into his existence, his surrogate brothers and sisters. There his disgust for them made him wish them all away.

Rhode had committed to heart the words of her enemy, the disciples of the false God, and it was their scriptures that she remembered now. At only the second tale family had forsaken family,

_And the Lord said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? And he said, I know not: Am I my brother's keeper?  
And he said, What hast thou done? the voice of thy brother's blood crieth unto me from the ground,_

and the same pattern had continued throughout the history of the wicked.

Loyalty was tenuous for these wrongful humans. They were the sinners that had survived the flood that the true God had intended to purge them. Like bugs desperate to survive to continue their bedevilment, they had swam the waters and infested the Earth.

She tenderly stroked Tyki's curls, damp from pain and exertion. How many times had she been asked, and how many times had she answered? Her family was wherever her eyes fell, because she was their keeper, and now her brother's Noah crieth unto her from an exorcist's innocence. One was in her dream with his heart black with the traitorous gift of Cain whispering murder to the idea of family. The cruelty of their father was intrinsic to his nature, as it was for the rest of them.

Such fratricidal progeny she would not forgive. Such ugliness was the legacy of Cain's family, and she would play on their own sin to break one of them.

She tore at the exorcist's faithless brother with the all the pride and love of the eldest Noah child.

--

When she runs her tongue along one twisting line of the licorice stick, the sheen of her spit laves the entire ropy candy a bright white. Her nails are so black that her brother can't tell where she ends and the bitter sweet begins. He sighs dreamily as he tucks the paper bag of confections in his pocket since her dress has no pockets. He thinks, she's practically spoilt by now. Rhode is his favorite, and the Earl's too. It shows.

"Tyki, Tyki!" she chirps boisterously as she clutches his hand and they waltz from one high steeple of the grand church to another. Tyki Mikk holds onto the girl with one hand the color of clay. She pivots from this anchor up onto a spire with a bounce of lace under-things.

"What is it, darling?" Tyki queries graciously.

What is Tyki? He is their incognito Noah, a prompter of feather-fanned swoons in the noble circles and the smiles of wiser girls that frequent the after-work hangouts of miners. He knows how to be gracious with little ladies of all ages, and certainly no one is more entitled than his sister. Their feet are not all that different as her black-leather Mary-Janes and his black-leather wingtips dive and pop two bloated pigeons into feathery puffs upon landing.

Her laugh is full of meaning. He can never appreciate it.

Because what is she? She is something that his too- young Noah brain can never understand. The whiff of humanity still lingers around him, the incriminating smell of mother's milk on an child.

And why never, if they are both immortal?

Because she knows so much, and he will always so little. She is so much, there is no way to describe her in a way that would make any sense to him, this boy who was born to things like houses that will fall apart from time alone and so many inadequate words.

Rhode is, now, the schoolgirl who fluffs up her pleated uniform skirt with a skip of her striped legs, as far Tyki knows. They frolic a rampage through the city as he swings a spin into her petite fairy body. Or maybe she is a tiny succubus-in-training when she dons her Noah. As far as Tyki knows.

"Just…Tyki!" she sings.

In Tyki's name is all things that clutch at her fancy with their ignorant newness. Things such as mankind's voice, and cooking sugar and plants into playful things, and pretty stones that men like him put up as blessed cages for themselves and their God. They use them for stepping stones now as they buoy up to the sky.

Humanity is just a baby, and Tyki comes from it. What he chooses to call his friends will die, and die, and die, and he will learn he does not care for it. But he, he will never die because it is the lot of only the Cain to pay for blood-crime through short loves and a fecklessness about saving others.

The Noah are the only ones who will last together always. And she will be his keeper until he knows.

Author's Note:

…I was reading Salome, by Oscar Wilde.

I… thought I'd try mixing the tenses…Past for the biblical, present for the more light-hearted slice of (Noah) life. Does it sound inexcusably bad?

For Inochi no Fushigi, who wanted to see the Noah family from me! She is a great beta too, so I owe her this and more, probs. Hope you liked! :-D


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